Even if advocates got everything they wanted here (6% margin vs 10% margin), that would lower rates by... 1.2 cents. PG&E desperately needs to be reformed into a competent organization, something that nobody in (Newsom) or adjacent to (these advocates) power in California seems to want to do.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
The CA Governor is the one who selects the people on the committee that regulate PG&E.
And the same committee approves PG&E’s budget and rate each year, all the way down to the fine details such as repairing an electrical fence at a substation.
This problem is entirely under the control of Newsom and the CA legislature yet they seem completely uninterested in fixing it.
The same is much true of California. So many strict laws and regulation. For the environment? For safety? Why I can't build a house? No, no - they don't want anyone building houses to keep the prices pumped up high. Same for many things. Keep PG&E rich, and PG&E will keep the people in power rich either directly or through the major supporters of said politicians
Fixing this would require both public funding of campaigns, and immense limits to campaigns. Certain people, ignorant or malicious, will pitch an insane fit about trying to do that.
It doesn't matter how much certain politicians "suck" because the way the system is built, your choices are a guy who is awful but will implement some of what you want, or a guy who is fucking bonkers and will destroy our country, and this is true regardless of your political affiliation.
Even Bernie sucks the political party money teat. Because being the most popular senator isn't a reliable enough way to get elected!
Our politicians spend more time on the job calling rich people and begging for cash than they do actually voting on or discussing legislation.
This will only continue to get worse because the rich people are fully in control, and it benefits them to keep pushing the cost of a campaign higher, as the richer of the rich benefit from boxing out the "just" very rich.
Any change requires serious moves to unseat the current supreme court.
Currently, populism is much more effective for extremely regressive and outright hateful politicians than extremely progressive ones though, so expect things to get much much worse.
FDR was only elected and provided the actual power to make changes after 30% of the country was jobless, and an entire generation had been raised in horrific fiscal policy, and lived in a world where a hard worker for 50 years died in the ditch because we had no retirement program or way of feeding people who no longer work.
If we do literally everything right and the very angry and stupid people suddenly put aside their hatred of "others" for long enough to actually vote for a good idea, we might see improvements in 30 years.
It's amazing that we had a governor recalled 20 years ago in no small part due to utility-related scandals, but these days, being a public servant in their pocket is just business as usual.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
- Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935)
Ironically that quote came from a book about Sinclair's failed bid to win the CA governorship...
If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?
Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes. But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).
Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency. A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.
This comes down to having quality regulators on your public utility commission which is heavily state dependent.
https://www.multistate.us/insider/2025/10/27/nine-states-fac...
The regulator gets down to relatively minor capital investments like fence replacement at substations.
Is part of the 10% profit going to these costs? Or since they're an expense it's not apart of the 10% profit?
In decent weather, one should not use resistive electric heat — one should use a heat pump. In decent weather, a COP of 4 is about par for the course, making electric heat a bit cheaper. So I don’t believe your assertion that “gas is so much cheaper per joule”.
Obviously this varies by what you do with your heat and the conditions. Gas stoves are wildly inefficient, but induction can exceed a COP of 100%. In very very cold weather, heat pump COP drops, so gas will win. Gas tankless water heaters are reasonably priced and can reach well over 90% efficiency, whereas heat pump water heaters need a tank, which is somewhat lossy.
But gas has a major downside (aside from CO2 and other emissions): you need to pipe the stuff to the endpoint, and a lot of communities, especially new developments, have decided that this is not worth the expense or danger.
[0] September 2025: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Yet much of America has utilities run for profit with far cheaper rates than California, where PG&E operates as a vertically-integrated regulated monopoly.
The real problem in CA is that our governor is in PG&E's pocket, and the body that regulates the utility (with members appointed by the governor) is a textbook example of regulatory capture. I'm not sure why the legislature hasn't done anything about this, but I assume it has something to do with money, there, as well.
At this point I want SF to own its own grid, like Santa Clara and Palo Alto do. Of course, PG&E refuses to play ball with any plan/offer the city has put forth.
https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/pg-e...
shrug they claim prices re going down?
>be freedom-loving capitalist America >be freedom-loving state of California and electrical engineering centre of the world >the government tells utility companies exactly how much yield they can make >down to a tenth of a percent >don’t worry bro this is about protecting_customers >the yield is on infrastructure and is extremely non-cyclical and effectively backstopped by the state of California. It’s a 30y investment at a time when 30y t bills are at ~5% >sets the yield at 10.3%
What am I missing?
the best escape valve against PG&E and Edison is installing solar panels and a battery.
I did find an installer who claimed they'd do it, but after a site visit -- where the guy taking measurements said everything looked fine -- my sales rep emailed to say they were dropping me as a prospective client, and bizarrely refused to tell me why when I asked.
Then NEM3 took effect and solar-only (with no battery storage) became financially infeasible. I should look around again, probably, since battery prices have gone down... though I'll probably have to wait until reasonable people are in power again nationally, who restore financial incentives for this stuff.
Then we should socialize that infrastructure as well. Otherwise if we're merely _amortizing_ the costs then a total capacity metric should apply to each user.
A private company shouldn't be allowed to socialize important shared infrastructure simply because a weak PUC pretends to engage in oversight.
A layered mix — county-level public utilities, some private operators, and some hybrid/municipal entities — might be closer to a resilient structure.
Not clean or elegant, but fault-tolerant.
The problem with PG&E isn't the rate structure, which isn't all that different from utilities anywhere else in the world. It's that their costs are exceedingly high, through a combination of regulatory pressures and grift. This is exacerbated by municipal and state regulators who are pushing consumers to be more reliant on electric power (bans on gas appliances in new construction, pushes toward EVs, etc).
There are vast swathes of the country where people pay 5-10x less for electricity.
If the floor is gentle, people can actually reduce usage without feeling punished for doing the right thing.
At the moment the baseline tier feels… maybe a “C-rating” version of what a real baseline could be?
If we treat baseline access as a kind of ‘civilization tax,’ the pricing shouldn’t feel punitive for low-usage households.
Today if I build a cabin somewhere I might decide not to electrify if it costs me $50 per month. But at $10? Sure!
It's a feature, not a bug.
They made their own bed. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-12-17/edison-...
Seems like it's unfair to ask the public to foot the bill for problems they caused in part because they wanted to stuff their pockets with cash instead of investing money in keeping their services up.
Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins? Or even 6% margins? It's risk-free money with a captive market.
What is the point of all this bullshit? Why not just call it a day, and run it as a crown corporation?
> The companies pointed to the January wildfires in Los Angeles County, saying they needed to provide their shareholders with more profit to get them to continue to invest in their stock because of the threat of utility-caused fires in California.
What utter nonsense. The shareholders need nothing. Take out a bloody loan.
The firm's entire concern, as reflected in the article - is it's stock price.
> Under the state’s system for setting electric rates, investors provide part of the money needed to build the infrastructure and then earn an annual return on that investment over the assets’ life, which can be 30 or 40 years.
Wait, why is this financed by investors and not lenders, like it is in the rest of the civilized world? Is this some kind of novel California-specific innovation, and if it is, what value has it produced for the world?
Indeed, how do they pick any margin? If higher is better, why not pick 1000%? If lower is better, why not pick 0%? If we want something reasonable, why not make it market based to figure out what people think when they have to stump up real resources themselves? Once profit margins are set by committee decision there is little point trying to claim that the concern is profit motivated. The profits aren't doing much useful signalling. It just sounds stupid.
Also, much of the point of having shareholders is that they take the risk. If something goes wrong, they lose their money first.
I have a hard time believing this; in the Bay Area, the privilege of simply having a 200A connection is $130/month.
I have a hard time believing that; that's not how PUC-regulated electric rates work in California (neither the old system nor the new system has a panel capacity component.)
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
You pay $0.40317/day for the connection but you get back $58.23 twice per year. That’s $30.70 per year.
It’s the price of the electricity that’s ridiculous in PG&E territory, not the price of the connection.
Note that many commercial users have a very different structure and pay monthly for their peak usage, measured over a 15 minute interval, and separately for their actual energy usage. So if you get a commercial 200A connection, max it out for 15 minutes, and then leave it idle for the rest of the month, you may pay something silly.
This comes off very much as "stop being poor lol." Was that your intent?
Some people can't afford a $38k car, heck, for some even $10k for a car is out of reach. There are people who have no choice but to buy a 20 year old ICE vehicle and pray it doesn't die. These same folks suffer due to the regressive nature of fuel tax.
Because California (whether residential or overall) uses very little electricity per capita (only Hawai'i uses less.
Rewind back to my childhood, living in NJ in the 80s and MD in the 90s. Our utility bill was significantly higher than what I pay now (inflation-adjusted) because the heat and a/c were on constantly for several months each out of the year.
Recall that it was so important for Newsom to attend that dinner at the height of COVID because it was Jason Kinney's 50th birthday party, a PG&E lobbyist and close advisor to Newsom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Most Athenians believed sortition, not elections, to be democratic[12][page needed] and used complex procedures with purpose-built allotment machines (kleroteria) to avoid the corrupt practices used by oligarchs to buy their way into office.
That's a valid position. My utility is a member-owned coöperative [1]. It pays me a dividend every year that I have the option of investing back into it for a return.
But that's not why its power is 10x cheaper than California's, despite my buying exclusively wind and hydro.
[1] https://www.lvenergy.com/my-account/unclaimed-patronage-capi...
The problem is that PG&E is just one player in a system built up over decades. The system is built on the wrong set of premises, continues to evolve based on those premises, and can only be fixed by rejecting those premises.
This is becoming increasingly obvious, and a politician like Newsom is too smart to tie himself to the mast of a sinking ship.
And why dependents included? Kids can’t move out? I already see ways to game it.
We already have an independent systems operator (ISO) to match the amount of load on the grid with the amount of generator current supplying it. I think this model could be expanded to where the state could literally own the transmission lines and equipment and use various regional contractors which would be engaged to maintain it in coordination with the ISO.
Then we have stable infrastructure where generation _and_ maintenance are open markets which may allow customer rates to no longer be controlled by a utilities commission and instead be directly computed from the actual suppliers costs plus taxes. It may even allow for more regional electric companies to form to provide better service to peculiar areas of the state.
I think heat pumps make sense to use when available, but that's kind of separate from electric heat sources. If you actually have to source your heat from the power source itself, it's cheaper to get it cookies.
I have a heat pump on my house, but there's also a high-efficiency furnace and its COP is over 90% combusting gas.
That's what did it. I initially interpreted it s "and their opinion shouldn't be counted" where I think you were saying "and they have little to no influence."
That’s why I offered one possible implementation as a hypothesis, not as a law of nature.
If you have a better non-ideal, real-world design in mind, I’d be interested to hear it — it makes the discussion much easier.
The effective income tax rate for many SF Bay Area techies is around 50%. Do we jack it up to 65% so that PG&E bills can go down from $400 to $100, like almost everywhere else in the country?
At that point the debate isn’t about pricing — it’s about survival of the system.
I could outline the full methodology behind this view, but that would turn the thread into a private seminar — and that’s not what comment sections are for.
We’ve become an incredibly selfish nation on average, and until these systems collapse and people get to feel the hot stove, they aren’t going to change their minds about keeping any sort of system or infrastructure in place
https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/pge-ceo-pay-p...
After the last bankruptcy, PG&E suspended dividends for six years, from 2018 to 2023.
https://investor.pgecorp.com/shareholders/dividend-informati...
No matter how good or bad management is, they’re still going to need to raise money. Bad management means more mistakes and then more money needs to be raised.
Bad management might get fired, but they’re not going to pay for their mistakes. The money needs to come from somewhere else.
The best case for Californians overall would have been PG&E's debt and equity to go as close to 0 as possible, and all that extra debt have been used to actually upgrade the aging electricity infrastructure. Instead you are paying interest on past fire damage claims.
In 2018 PG&E had about $18b of long term debt, they now have just under $59b. Their outstanding shares also quadrupled. The bankruptcy didn't wipe out the equity, but investors got f'd hard if they thought they were acting conservatively. Would you accept a 1.25%ish dividend with the prospects of the stock going to 0 higher than it doubling in the next 10 years?
For all of the whiners about how utility investors shouldn't make any money, and possibly earn below their cost of capital, -- I spent some time looking at the utility industry over the last few years (including PG&E.) These are basically money pits which more money goes in than comes out over decades.
The other layer here is if the billions of dollars being borrowed are to build new infrastructure results in billions more in future liabilities to maintain everything. The first layer looked so bad I didn't go any further.
The petty dividend payouts utilities make just keep the equity investors from examining what they really own. Higher equity valuations let utilities borrow money cheaper than they really should be able to.
Functionally the whole thing looks like a ponzi scheme that perhaps could only happen with the 40 year run of ever shrinking interest rates. If the bond bull market is over then this utility ponzi scheme is going to blow too.
Bottom line, if investors were paying attention, your utility bills would be a lot higher. If utilities ever have a big problem getting Wall Street to keep funding their debt ponzi, they will be.
The alternative is the state owns the utility. Given how ugly the math is for utilities right now, I doubt it would be cheaper.
On the other hand, if the US is going 100% EV (AI datacenters or not), then there trillions of federal dollars are inbound and maybe utilities will be ok. One thing is for certain, the utilities, their investors (debt & equity) their customers, and the US states don't have the money to pay for all that has to be built.
Exactly what risk did they take on? A few missed dividends, and two years for the stock price to recover?
As for the second bankruptcy, the main result of that was that their customers ended up paying the bill for other customers whose houses were destroyed. But you are partially correct, the shareholders did take a haircut of a few percentage points from stock dilution. I wouldn't be too upset for them, the stock's now double what it was before the bankruptcy.[1]
California's cities wanted them to take a haircut of 100 percentage points, but that clearly didn't happen.
[1] For some reason, the wise stewardship of the shareholders and the board did nothing to mitigate the crisis that caused the company to get sued for 50 billion dollars. They were too busy squeezing dividends out of it to worry about liabilities. [2]
[2] And why should they? They aren't personally liable.
If we go back 30 years to 1995 -- and you invested $10,000 in PG&E and $10,000 in the S&P500, and reinvested the dividends -- today the PG&E investment would be worth $11,708. The S&P investment would be worth $201,420.
To put it in simpler terms, the PG&E investors look like gullible fools.
2. You're not counting all the dividends they've siphoned out.
3. The reason it's at $16 today is because the company destroyed its own value... By prioritizing dividends over maintenance. Which killed a lot of people, destroyed a ton of property, with the damages exceeding the value of the firm. Yet, instead of being zeroed out, the shareholders are still there, still collecting dividends, and in a few years of guaranteed 10% margins, I'm sure the stock will recover.
There's half of the major problems. If I walked around covered in gasoline every day and eventually walked past someone smoking, not a lot of people would blame the smoker for me getting engulfed in flames.
Yet build a wood house in a forest maintained for thousands of years by American Indians with fire, require universal electricity supply, and suddenly it's not the homeowner's fault at all. Everyone else should bail them out over and over again.
It didn't quite manage to blame the smoker, but it did get everyone else to foot the bill for the burn ward and the hospital stay.
After the bankruptcy? Did the shareholders maintain their ownership through bankruptcy? Or were the creditors turned into shareholders?
They came out squeaky clean in 2001, keeping all their shares. (Major shout-out to the State of California for bailing them out, and shouldering all the subsequent liabilities from that adventure.)
The second one diluted them by 22%, by creating and giving new stock to the people who won lawsuits against the firm. The stock's up by more than 22% since the impact of the fires on the company was realized...
If they were zeroed out after either bankruptcy, I wouldn't be kvetching, but here we are...